I mentioned this in the ACX post on this too, but:
In my opinion, the strongest moral reason to not have children (for ~ any cause area, up to and including for pronatalism) is that the resources can be better spent elsewhere.
The strongest reason to have children is because you or your partner would personally be happier or more productive if you had children. The second strongest reason is if you think childrearing is actually the most cost-effective thing for you to do on the margin because of the effects of the children themselves, but at least for me, on the current margin, the burden of proof should be against.
I don’t have a confident view on this, but I can easily imagine situations where all your (grand)children have a bigger impact on the world than you alone. It might make sense for people to try and make their own EV calculations here.
I think that it is very difficult to beat community building (even non-professionally, just in some spare time) by having children. There is also an exponential growth in the effect, and probably with a greater growth factor. Moreover, the similarity between you and your grandchildren is probably not that important, and it is very plausible to me that their effectiveness decreases sufficiently quickly so that it doesn’t even beat direct effects that you could have instead.
This is also my view, and I think it applies on basically all consequentialist views, including even strong negative utilitarian views that you might have expected to endorse antinatalism.
I mentioned this in the ACX post on this too, but:
In my opinion, the strongest moral reason to not have children (for ~ any cause area, up to and including for pronatalism) is that the resources can be better spent elsewhere.
The strongest reason to have children is because you or your partner would personally be happier or more productive if you had children. The second strongest reason is if you think childrearing is actually the most cost-effective thing for you to do on the margin because of the effects of the children themselves, but at least for me, on the current margin, the burden of proof should be against.
I don’t have a confident view on this, but I can easily imagine situations where all your (grand)children have a bigger impact on the world than you alone. It might make sense for people to try and make their own EV calculations here.
I think that it is very difficult to beat community building (even non-professionally, just in some spare time) by having children. There is also an exponential growth in the effect, and probably with a greater growth factor. Moreover, the similarity between you and your grandchildren is probably not that important, and it is very plausible to me that their effectiveness decreases sufficiently quickly so that it doesn’t even beat direct effects that you could have instead.
This is also my view, and I think it applies on basically all consequentialist views, including even strong negative utilitarian views that you might have expected to endorse antinatalism.